I am amazed at how fundamentally bad customer service has become. I have a trial account with Broadvoice to experiment with a VoIP based phone switch which has been working great. Last night I found an option on their web site to add additional numbers to my account, when I saw that I could get a much better I jumped at it (and paid a fee mind you). In the process of doing this my old number was de-provisioned (which I don’t mind) but is still bound on my account as my primary account number. So now I am in limbo waiting for my system to work again.
This morning I spoke to a great guy in the customer service department. He was really helpful and tried his best to help me. Unfortunately some of their tools were offline so there was only so much he could do. He created a ticket for their engineering group and told me that someone would be calling be back shortly.
After a couple of hours had past (I’ve learned to call back often) I called customer service to inquire again on my ticket. Not only was this representative condescending and arrogant he told me that it would take 3-5 days for engineering to look at the ticket. Rather surprised I asked him to confirm the 3-5 days and ask what I am supposed to do for phone service for the next week. He suggested that I forward my calls to a different number.
We live in a service economy. For most industries this means that consumers have multiple options available to them and the distinguishing factor boils down the service and treatment that the customer receives.
Up to this point I have had fantastic service from Broadvoice. It’s amazing, and should be remembered how quickly how one bad interaction can drive someone to rant on their blog.
I have been sitting here on hold with Broadvoice’s “customer service” toll free line for over 40 minutes, waiting for some help. My business has 4 broadvoice lines into our PBX, and all lines through Broadvoice are down. Not only is this bad for our business, but they never mentioned that this might happen. Their system just says, “the party you are trying to reach is currently busy, please leave a message…”… then it takes your message. No telling how that voicemail message might get to us…
This is disturbing.
Welcome to BV.
This company will fold or be bought out.
They do not have any form of customer service.
They have a support line that is reset every 30 minutes. So if you are holding for an agent forget it. Just keep recalling.
Stay away from this one.
I had a family emergency and my relatives could not call through to my broadvoice number; it did not ring so I did not know that there was an emergency.
FUCK YOU Broadvoice! I missed my grandfather’s last moments!
With my initial Broadvoice line I chose to go with my home – I had done a bunch of research and found the two strongest players – or so I thought – were vonage and broadvoice – With my business I went with vonage well over a year ago – we now have 8 vonage lines for my business – and have had peaks and valleys with the service and dropped calls etc…. With broadvoice, I was sure that they would be the only other voip player to be able to compete with vonage, and seemed to have a stronger offering for service – along with international – but lacked any real faxing capability (although I read that people have had success faxing over their regular line) I chose to go with it as a trial at my home – glad I did the test at home instead of at the office – We had good luck overall with the BV until about a month ago when the problems started – they have gotten no better to date and I am on the verge of launching them out – we have consistant “this number is not in service” message that sounds a lot like the local telco – NOT it is a BV recording from what i understand – and we get “we are having issues with a local carrier/partner” as the excuse. Im not a geek by any strech – but I did embrace voip as it offered us a reasonable way to have multiple locations have som sembelance of a phone system – pbx features – While waiting for vonage to come up with more small business features, I was thinking BV would be the up and coming and probably blow right by vonage – dosent look that way now – I am dismayed to say the least – convergent says that they are the manufacturer of the switches that enabled vonage to be in business, not sure if thats true or not – but my thought process was that if they are the ones with the technology to do the switching, this business is a nutural fit for them – guess I and they were wrong in that assumption – If it is not back up and operational by Friday we are gone.
BroadJoke is just about out of business, just as well, the service is terrible!
Broadvoice was great for a month or so for me.
However, when they had their little system crash there, I barely had no phone service and then ran up my cell phone bill. I spent 2 weeks of constantly e-mailing asking them if they would allow my number to be ported. Of course at this point I had seen on their site they no longer had numbers in my state. Then I go to cancel (I used my own device) and they responded to that e-mail right away along with how they had charged my checking account 49.95, which had 39 bucks in it (right before payday) 7 e-mails later and sitting on hold for an hour they finally credited my account back. Within 2 days it still was a pending CHARGE and two smaller charges came through, so there are 2 $30 overdraft charges.
That is the shortened version, but they never answer their phones, nor e-mails. Technicallly they still owe me for a months of service for when the system was down or acting up, plus when I cancelled I was only a week from the last bill. Hope they do go out of business soon.
I think broadvoice sucks as well. At first I loved it. But then having experienced no-service, bad-service, lousy tech support, no customer service… I put up a website called http://www.broadvoicesucks.com. I would love to hear from anyone here that shares my distain for broadvoice and any suggestions you might have is wellcome.
Communicate with Broadvoice via your credit card company!
Maintain a log of the frequent outages and dispute pro-rated charges. Emails and calls are useless…